May 10, 2011 -- As landslides go the 2011 Holyrood election was huge. Scotland has been
shaken to its political foundations as voters again voiced their
contempt for the Conservative Party [Tories], its coalition partner the Liberal Democratic Party [Lib Dems], and also the Labour Party. The Scotsman newspaper described the result of the May 5 Scottish election as a "victory of
hitherto unthinkable proportions" for the Scottish National Party (SNP). Even The Scotsman can be
right some of the time!

In truth the extent of the victory
surprised even the SNP. It emerged with 45% of the vote [its largest
ever], 69 seats [out of 129] and the first overall majority in
Holyrood’s history. At counts across the country, SNP candidates arrived
expecting third or fourth place and walked out hours later "as the newly
elected MSP for the said constituency". The front page of Saturday's
Edinburgh Evening News said it all. It led with a photograph of the
newly elected MSP for Edinburgh Southern emerging from a bookmakers with
his £750 winnings after he put £50 on himself to win at 14-1 just a
fortnight ago. That former Lib-Dem seat was, according to all received
wisdom, Labour’s for the taking.

It is impossible to
underplay the scale of the SNP victory. Even the "certainties" of the
D’Hont PR system employed to distribute Holyrood seats were swept aside.
So many people voted for the SNP that after winning all the
constituency seats in some regions they also got MSPs on the same
regional list! Legends are made of this. The SNP’s message, albeit
deceitful, that "the list vote elects the First Minister" brought them
huge dividends.

The SNP’s sophisticated, multimillion pound
election campaign, with its navigational tools for activists and social
networking operations, completely outstripped the once powerful Labour
machine. Pollsters YouGov reported that 80,000 Labour voters across
Scotland switched to the SNP in the final 36 hours, in disgust at its
increasingly negative campaign and incessant targeted mail shots. When
they had constituency activists on the ground Labour knew when to leave
people well alone!

Beleaguered and belaboured

Can it
really only be a year since every Labour MP in Scotland increased their
majority? This time the all-conquering Labour Party of Lowland Scotland
fell to pieces like a Laurel and Hardy car. If definitive and final
proof were needed that people vote one way in Westminster elections and
another for Holyrood this is it.

In Labour’s central belt "heartlands" its seats toppled like nine pins. And comparing the May 5
results with the notional results from 2007 [itself a bad night for
Labour] does not sufficiently explain the scale of its collapse. A
better comparison would be to look at how Labour’s five-figure
majorities from last year poured into the SNP corner.

Labour
imagined the protest vote against the Lib-Dem's participation in the Conservative British government would go to it, so why didn’t it?
The answer is that Labour, like the Con-Dem Coalition, also support public
spending cuts and tuition fees. Labour offered no real alternative.
Former Lib-Dem voters were also seduced by SNP leader Alex Salmond’s claims of
managerial competency at Holyrood. These SNP achievements in wooing
disenchanted Liberals should not be regarded lightly. There is little
love lost between the two parties, but on this occasion the support the
SNP won from the Lib-Dem voters was the difference between winning and winning
an overall majority.

As it turned out even the so-called "rogue" poll of April 2, which first suggested the SNP had an overall
majority, underestimated its support. And let’s not forget that
Labour started this election campaign with a 15% lead!

The fact is Salmond attracted votes not just from disaffected Lib Dems, but also Labour, Green, Tory and SSP supporters too.

Ephemeral of earth shattering?

The
central question is how much of this change is ephemeral, a one-off, a
freak result, and how much of it has broken the political mould?

Those
who tentatively suggest the former must reckon with the five-year term the
SNP majority now has in this Scottish Parliament. That’s certainly not
superficial. Neither is the scale of Labour’s collapse.

On the
other hand those who suggest we are now in permanent new territory must
ask how can the SNP keep seats like Edinburgh Pentlands and Edinburgh
West when they have virtually no activists there and little natural
support as its political opponents wait to pounce? And what will be the
consequences in next year's council elections after a year of public
spending cuts?

There are those of course who argue that the
result on May 5 illustrates a certain "political promiscuity" by
voters who voted for Labour in huge numbers last year and opted for the
SNP equally emphatically this time. This demonstrates, so it is argued,
an inherent volatility in politics because there are no ideological differences between the four establishment parties. And this is certainly
true if you examine Alex Salmond’s economic program, his business
plan or international policy in regards to say Libya or Afghanistan.
And the public spending cuts which he delayed until after this election
sit in his in-tray awaiting his scissors.

The cuts

Above
all it is the issue of the cuts which will now test Salmond’s
popularity most. Popularity levels like his can only go one way. Ask
Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg! And the SNP has very difficult choices now to make during
continued economic stagnation. It faces making severe public spending
cuts. And it has as a party no compunction in voting for them, unlike
the SSP. It votes through cuts every day in councils across Scotland and
it will do so again at Holyrood. Of course Salmond will try valiantly
to pin the blame on Prime Minsiter David Cameron and Clegg. And rightly so, but in the end he
will not fight the cuts, he will make them. That brings huge public
opposition and with it huge opportunities for the left.

Salmond
must make £3 billion of cuts over five years and these will be severe and
unpopular. A shrewd and cunning political operator he might be -- look at
the way he announced his five-year council tax freeze for example at
the same time as he unceremoniously and largely unnoticed dumped the
SNP’s commitment to an income-based alternative -- but he will make them
nonetheless.

Neither will an SNP government confront the
employing classes or redistribute the great wealth of Scotland. Salmond
may be a populist but he will defend the interests of big business in
Scotland as mercilessly as anyone else.

The message from the
people of Scotland to Alex Salmond however remains unequivocal -- these
cuts are utterly unnecessary and indefensible and he must fight them!
The economic crisis wasn’t caused by the greed and recklessness of
working people and the poor after all.

"The SNP has been
good for Scotland" boasted Salmond defending his four-year record at
Holyrood. But which Scotland does he mean? The 200 businesspeople who
endorsed him on polling day? Sir David Murray? Sir Jackie Stewart? Sir
Tom Farmer? The Scottish Sun and News of the World whom also blessed him
with an endorsement? The Scottish Sunday Express? They all believe the
SNP has been good for them and that’s why they backed Salmond on May 5!

"Alex Salmond has been good for Scotland",they said in
unison. "That’s why we support his re-election as First Minister." John
Swinney welcomed their backing and said, "Captains of Industry have
benefited from the SNP."

The Sunday Times Rich List came out at
the weekend and what’s remarkable about the table of Scots billionaires
and millionaires is the number who came out last week in support of the
SNP. As New Labour found to its cost, you can support the millionaires or
you can support the millions. Getting it wrong has devastating
consequences electorally.

So there’s the rub. Millions of
Scots voted for the SNP to fight the cuts and to stand up to the Tories
but the SNP now supports a regressive council tax freeze, cutting
corporation tax and imposing cuts in public services, jobs, pay and £3.3 billionn off
the budget over the next five years.

Independence

Undoubtedly
the most profound impact of the astonishing May 5 result is the
likelihood of a referendum on Scottish independence. The SNP said it did not present the bill in the last parliament because it had no majority. Now it does. Independence just took a great leap forward as Mao might have
said.

There is no doubt that the case for independence took a
battering during the election campaign itself as the SNP leadership
barely rose to its defence while the [pro-British] parties, sensing a
weakness in the SNP’s armour, poured endless cold water on it. In these
circumstance it is little wonder the polls show support for independence now below
30%.

Supporters of independence like the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) therefore have a
huge task on our hands to win the argument for independence outside
Holyrood in the pubs, clubs, community centres and workplaces across the
land. But it can and must be done. The case for independence must be
won before the referendum is called.

This offers an
unprecedented opportunity for the left. The SNP is incapable of
delivering a majority for independence on its own and to be fair it has
acknowledged this frequently in the Independence Convention which the
SSP joined.

It remains our job on the left to outline the
alternative vision for independence. The alternative to neoliberalism,
warmongering, privatisation and profiteering. How many of the 69 SNP
MSPs for example will protest at having to swear the oath of allegiance
to the Queen? The party favours independence with the Queen as head of state.

Alex Salmond is undoubtedly a shrewd politician who
closely courts popularity, but he also supports the NATO attacks on Libya
and the British occupation of Afghanistan. He also supports the
monarchy and cutting corporation tax for employers and retaining the
unfair council tax. The SSP is better able to persuade progressive
Scotland of the case for independence.

The left

Given
the huge swing to the SNP, which swept all before it, taking dozens of
seats from Labour, Liberals, Tories and Greens [polls suggested the
Greens could get eight seats] alike it is hardly surprising the left’s vote
was squeezed. We were also entirely eclipsed in the way the
media covers this big money election.

The left was never at the
races. In Glasgow, George Galloway got 6500 votes but never looked like
winning and he has gone back to where he came from leaving nothing
behind pretty much as usual. The Socialist Labour Party got the biggest
left vote with 10,000 but it has been unable to coalesce the left in
Scotland up to now and that will not change. The SSP vote [8722] was
also disappointing and down from 2007. This was inevitable after the
fiasco of the Tommy Sheridan trial in January. Sheridan's organisation Solidarity, as expected, were
the biggest losers given its disgraced leader's incarceration for
lying.

It is also true that nowadays the left’s resources
are minuscule compared to the millions spent by Labour and the SNP and
this disparity makes an uneven contest all but impossible.

For
the Scottish Socialist Party and the left as a whole the task must be to build up support for
the socialist case again and to act with others to establish new fresh
ideas and a potent political base of support in communities, workplaces
and among those fighting the cuts. There will be many opportunities
presented to us in the weeks, months and years to come. We need to roll
up our sleeves and take the socialist case to new generations of
political activists.

The 2012 council elections offer an opportunity for a
breakthrough. But as SSP councillor Jim Bollan put it to me during the
election, you have to lay foundations before you put up the walls and
take your seat. This time last year I met the team behind Green MP
Caroline Lucas’s success in Brighton and asked them what they put their
victory in getting Britain's first Green MP elected down to. They each
said "25 years hard work at ground level". After May 5, the
Greens are the biggest party on Brighton and Hove Council.

Voters bring break up of Britain closer?

By Raphie de Santos

May 7, 2011 -- Socialist Resistance -- Voters in the May 5, 2011, Holyrood election in Scotland swung from
parties right across the political spectrum to the Scottish National
Party (SNP) to give it a majority in the next Scottish parliament.
The primary reason was that they saw as large as possible SNP
representation in the Scottish parliament as the best way of protecting
Scotland against the British Conservative Party-Liberal Demcrat coalition government's £111 billion austerity program of
cuts and tax rises.

The secondary reason was to give the SNP the option if life became so
unbearable under London’s austere winter term of five years to
go for an independence referendum and set Scotland up as an independent
country based on a different set of principles which value public
services and care of all in society.

Not everyone thought this of course and only just over half of the
electorate voted in the election with many believing no matter what
party you have in Holyrood they would be unable to significantly stop
the cuts.

But when the Scottish electorate looked to see who would be their
bulwark against British Prime Minister David Cameron's assault on them they looked at
Labour and what did they find? A party that had been partly responsible
for the financial bubble and crisis and recession that has led to the
cuts. A party whose solution to the debt crisis was to have its own
austerity programme of £72 billion cuts and tax rises.

When they looked at the Lib-Dems they saw a partner in the ruling
coalition that said there was no alternative to the debt burden but cuts
in services and tax rises. When they looked at the small socialist
parties they saw a fragmented left that has remained partly paralysed
since November 2004 by the events surrounding Tommy Sheridan News of the
World case and resulting trials. This was not helped by the appearance
of George Galloway’s Respect party in Glasgow, which was backed by
sections of the left. His [anti-independence] stance, pledge to back Labour and
opportunist exploitation of the sectarian issue in Scotland fell on deaf
ears and he failed to even get half the votes he needed to get elected.

Even Tory supporters deserted their party, albeit in smaller numbers than the Lib-Dems, for the SNP.

Only the Green Party held on to its seats and increased its vote as
the Greens offered the only coherent unified alternative to the cuts, with
promises of wealth redistribution and taking control of the banks.

The SNP offered no real alternative to the cuts either but talked
blandly about defending Scotland’s interests. The cuts were in effect
the elephant in the room for the major parties in these elections. They
all talked of job creation when they all knew that jobs were already
being lost and up to 100,000 public sector and many tens of thousands of
private jobs would go in Scotland over the course of the Coalition’s
five year term of austerity.

Instead the SNP focused on extending its five-year council tax
freeze which has already cost the public sector about £240 million in
cuts – and it dropped its alternative to it a progressive local
income tax. The SNP made no mention of its up and coming two-year public
sector wage freeze – in effect a 10% pay cut with inflation running at
5% a
year. There was no mention of its administering and managing of the
British government’s £1.3 billion cut to the block grant for 2011/212.

Of course there is much worse to come in the way of cuts for
Scotland. By the end of British government’s term in May 2015 the annual cut to
the block grant will be in the region of £6.4 billion – 20% or 25%
adjusted for inflation. On top of that £1.6 billion will have to be cut
off the National Health Service budget to match the efficiency savings
that are being made in England. Interesting Scotland's deputy first minister Nicola
Sturgeon is already openly talking about the need for the NHS in
Scotland to make efficiency savings.

Here in the British government’s cuts program lies the SNP’s strategy. It
will be five years until the next Scottish election because a four-year
cycle would mean it would clash with the next Westminster one in 2015.
By then the cuts will have gone deep and may have to be even deeper
under the British government’s or possibly the IMF’s auspices. Under the
British government’s best-case scenario – which is likely to prove too optimistic
– public debt is set to grow to 105% of real GDP by 2015 and the annual
interest payments alone will eat up 20% of our annual tax revenues.

With the SNP saying it is not to blame for the cuts – they are the
Conservative-LibDem Coalition’s brainchild to solve Labour’s mess – it will call a
referendum on independence saying that the only way out of this mess is
if Scotland has full independence and fiscal powers. The SNP is about to
start a fight with the Coalition over the Scotland bill which is shortly
to have its third reading in Westminster and has had legislative
approval by the Scottish parliament at the start of 2011. It cuts basic
and higher taxation by half while at the same time cutting the central
grant by £11 billion a year to Scotland.

Restoring the tax rates to their original level will only bring in an
additional £6 billion in revenue leaving a £5 billion shortfall to the
block grant. The Scottish Parliament can raise the tax rates higher than
in the rest of UK to avoid the shortfall. But the aim of the whole bill
is to open up the door to implement the cuts the British government needs to
make in Scotland while shifting the blame for them onto the Scottish Parliament – you can have cuts or tax rises.

There are two dangers to this strategy. One the Scottish people rise
up against this austerity program and say to the SNP: do something now
about these cuts and tax rises. Two, the SNP have no program to fill
the £8 billion gap (£10 billion in real terms) in public spending by the
time of possible independence in 2016 apart from a Celtic Tiger mark II
economy. A solution to the spending gap would require among other
thing taking North Sea Oil and the banks under public control and
ownership, a rich tax on the super wealthy and progressive local and
national taxation where the better off pay considerably more than the
less well off. Of course the SNP is not prepared to do this and upset its corporate friends or wealthy and better-off voters.

This gives the best opportunity for the left in Scotland to argue
that there should be no cuts, not just under independence but now.
Second to put forward a program that makes the rich and wealthy pay
for this crisis and takes the wealth and power under peoples’ control
in Scotland.

That way we can push the march towards the break of the British
capitalist state not just into independence for Scotland but a Scottish
Socialist Workers Republic that will inspire and be copied by others on
these islands.

[Raphie de Santos is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. The
views expressed are his own and of no other person or organisation.]